The text for this work is a poem "written" (or
at least compiled) by a computer, randomly ordering lines which
have been fed into it. The creation of the poem
occurs halfway through Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's
Pendulum, and may serve as something of a microcosm of that
book's central theme: the joyous, random
association of unrelated ideas, in a never-ending quest for
significance.

The present work takes Eco's poem as the
starting point for a whimsical exploration of the relationship
between text as meaning, text as sound, and music.
In contrast to the disordered (and even dismembered) treatment of
the words, the music is very highly ordered, with each short
movement a self-contained, closed structure. In
particular, the piece exhibits an obsession with powers of
three: there are 31 performers,
32 movements, 33 different pitches in each
movement, a rhythmic framework of 34 beats in each
movement, 35 notes in each movement . . .